Thursday, December 17, 2009

After being forced to watch The Love Guru recently, I was appalled at the dreadful depths to which onscreen entertainment has fallen. The trashiness that saturates the programs offered for our viewing makes me feel physically ill—and secretly intrigued. I dug deep into the dark, hairy underbelly of Hollywood to uncover some of the other most tasteless, atrocious, and unprofitable films ever made.

The general plot of Over Her Dead Body is that Eva Longoria gets killed by an ice-sculpture on her wedding day, then comes back and haunts her husband’s new girlfriend. In the end, her betrothed marries the living woman and Eva goes back to heaven—griping, I know. Sean Axmaker, a reviewer from theSeattle Post-Intelligencer said, “... It’s as flat as day-old soda, a comedy completely lacking in bubbles or fizz.” Basically, don’t worry about her dead body; worry about dying of boredom from watching this film.

The trajectory that this shameful attempt at filmmaking follows is evident from the moment the hottie protagonist falls for the nottie—after she gets plastic surgery. As of April 2008, the film is ranked as the thirteenth worst movie of all time in IMDb’s Bottom 100 list—it scored 1.6 points out of a possible 10. I guess Paris should stick to her day job ... not that she actually has one.

By combining the mighty star powers of JLo and Ben Affleck, producers were certain they had a sure-fire hit. Ultimately, they created the world’s worst miss. Gigli received a rating of below 0 stars from Time—the only movie in history to receive this score. Critics called Gigli “the ultimate turkey of all time,” and audiences, already sick of Bennifer’s overexposure, were happy to see the movie tank.

This movie features Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, the winner and runner-up of the first season ofAmerican Idol. Texan singing waitress Kelly Taylor meets Pennsylvania college student Justin Bell; they fall in love and spend the rest of the movie being annoying. On IMDb.com, the film is currently rated as the twenty-fourth worst movie ever made—even lower on the list than Daddy Day Camp.

Glitter follows the life of a struggling songstress in the eighties. (Hmm … sounds a bit like an autobiography, Ms. Butterfly.) Mariah did win an award for this film (at the 2001 Golden Raspberries)—an award for worst actress. I would rather watch the music video “Hero” by clicking Repeat for 104 minutes than sit through this movie.

In its attempt to depict the experience of being a first-generation Indian-American, this film exaggerates every possible stereotype and manages to be completely unfunny. As if the ridiculous movie poster isn’t enough of an indication of this film’s intelligence level, it also has an unclever title and degrades the affable, hilarious Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar fame. Three strikes, it’s out!

As the title indicates, Freddy Got Fingered is a disgustingly gross, exaggerated version of the Tom Green Show. This movie uses situations created for their shock value and jokes of the seven-year-old-booger-and-gas-passing genre. Green fails painfully in his attempt at telling this semi-autobiographical story of living in his dad’s garage and spreading rumors of his dad abusing his younger brother. Sounds like a laugh riot, right? Yeah, no one else thought so either. Needless to say, the movie bombed at the box office.

First of all—what in the world is an Eck or a Sever? This film is so bad that it doesn’t even matter.Ballistic is a 2002 action film featuring Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas, who play secret agents pretending to be enemies. Rotten Tomatoes ranked Ecks vs. Sever number one on the Worst of the Worst movie list—I agree.

You might think that Eddie Murphy in a fat suit equals hilarious, side-splitting laughter all around. You would be wrong. Not only is Norbit racist, it’s just not funny. A film critic from the UK had the following words of wisdom, “If you paid to see Norbit, look deep inside yourself. Look deep inside yourself and take the same amount of money you paid to see that movie and give it to a good cause because, believe me, you’re karmically unbalanced if you paid to see that film.”

It takes a lot of courage (or a lot of stupidity) to make a sequel to a Jim Carrey movie and not have Jim Carrey actually in the movie (à la Dumb and Dumberer). With an $84 million budget and a $17 million domestic box office gross, I’d venture to say that this movie was a flop. If you like comedy, movies, laughter, and an all-around good time, do not see Son of the Mask.

Sometimes movies are so horrendously awful, they end up being good. These movies are not that type—they are just plain bad. Don’t waste your brain cells on these movies—go to a museum instead.